1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer programming and, more particularly, to defining more efficient standard data definitions used in computer programming.
2. Related Art
The need for recording, structuring and passing information between programs or scripts written in different languages running on one or more different platforms is becoming increasingly important. This is accomplished using a standard data definition document (DDD) written in a platform independent language such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML). These standard DDDs are interpreted and stored in computer memory as a document object model (DOM). DOMs have a hierarchical structure having various levels with branching at each successively lower level. Each level has nodes with some nodes being ‘parent’ nodes that may have 1 or more lower level ‘child’ nodes (“children”).
A DOM is an instance of a DDD running inside a computer.
Prior art DDDs define information (“attributes”) for parent nodes; however, it is implied that these attributes are inherited to their children. Therefore, the implied information must be extracted during interpretation of the DDD, or by querying a DOM. This requires specific programming to extract child attributes from a DOM each time they are needed and can be very time consuming and prone to error.
Currently, there is a need of a DDD structure for extracting and using DOM data in a more efficient manner.